Reading Horizons
Volume 8, Issue 3
1968
Article 4
A PRIL 1968
Is It New?
Hazel Askin∗
∗
Galesburg-Augusta Elementary School, Michigan
c
Copyright 1968
by the authors. Reading Horizons is produced by The Berkeley Electronic
Press (bepress). http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading horizons
Is It New?
Hazel Askin
Abstract
Education by hard, cold definition is a drawing, or leading out process-a growing into, from
the Latin verb “educo.” It would seem then, on the surface anyway, that any process or technique
for teaching of reading or any other part of the curriculum would have been a gradual outgrowth
of preceding techniques, philosophies or procedures. When news media and public communications systems, therefore, douse a reading and viewing public with buckets of intellectual baptism
purported to be new and revolutionary, it would seem advisable for professional people to become acquainted with factual backgrounds of these so-called ”new” techniques before becoming
”band-wagon jumpers.”
IS IT NEW?
Hazel Askin
GALESBURG·AUGUSTA ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
Education by hard, cold definition is a drawing, or leading out
process-a growing into, from the Latin verb "educo." It would
seem then, on the surface anyway, that any process or technique for
teaching of reading or any other part of the curriculum would have
been a gradual outgrowth of preceding techniques, philosophies or
procedures. When news media and public communications systems,
therefore, douse a reading and viewing public with buckets of intellectual baptism purported to be new and revolutionary, it would seem
advisable for professional people to become acquainted with factual
backgrounds of these so-called "new" techniques before becoming
"band-wagon jumpers."
"We need to use every approach we can, every tool available and
all the vitality we can muster to start beginning readers on their
way." 1 Supplementary to this statement is the idea that children
with a reading problem need all of these approaches for help of a
remedial nature. 11any times it obviously becomes a matter of the
most valuable technique to use for this particular person, not whether
it is the "newest" thing.
Writers of books on reading usually classify the practice of teachers
as belonging to this or that "method. n The vagueness of the word
method becomes apparent when one discovers that an alphabetic
method was also called the spelling method, or the ABC method. A
method called phonic was referred to as syllabic; a word method has
been referred to as the look-say method and the sentence method
was labelled the global method. There are some others, too: the phrase
method, the experience-chart method, the story method, the phonic
word method, the non-oral method, and even the gingerbread method.
It did not seem possible or feasible to eliminate the word method,
but it is necessary to keep in mind that each of these methods is
amoebic in its power to change shape. There was no single alphabetic
method, or phonic method, and the same is true of all the other
practices which are called methods. Another difficulty was to make
allowance for the difference between theory and practice; between
what was advised and what was actually done.
The chronology is very loose, but it is there. From the earliest
times of which there is any record until well into the nineteenth century, the alphabet method predominated. Phonic teaching in spite of
1. Helen S. Craymer, The Instructor, Vol. 76, No.3, (November 1966), p. 147.
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word method off-shoots dominated the second half of that century
and continued into this one. Word and sentence methods have been
the twentieth century orthodoxy. During the past decade or so, there
has been a strong reaction, at least in theory, against word and
sentence methods in their more extreme forms and this reaction is
accompanied by a return to the late nineteenth century interest in a
form of regular spelling as an aid in learning to read.
Sometimes even the diligent student of the history of reading is
likely to get the impression from books on the subject that the pupil
who was taught by an alphabetic method learned the names of the
letters, but not their sounds. Emphasis was placed on the alphabetic
method stressing the names of the letters and the phonics method,
the sound of letters. Some authors neglect to point out that the
teaching material of the simple hornbook, to say nothing of the
early primer, while alphabetically oriented was designed quite precisely
for the purpose of teaching the sounds of consonants when combined
with vowels.
Alphabetic methods were subjected to many cntIcIsms during
the first half of the nineteenth century. They have the peculiar distinction, however, of not having been shown by some manipulation
of statistics to be inferior to all other methods or combination of
methods. They went out before statistics came in-went out as a
recognized modern method, I mean. Horace Mann's powerful
indictment of them in favor of a word method laid the basis for some
experiment with word methods in the United States.
In 1908, Huey wrote on the nature of perception in reading,
stating that the natural method of learning to read is just the same
as learning to talk, i.e. by the method of imitation. "Vithout special
methods and devices the child grasps the meaning of words and
sentences gradually, a little here and a little there, not troubling about
the still obscure parts. A few years later he finds that he is in an
environment of books. All of it has at first as little meaning as had
the spoken sentences he had listened to. His scribbling is as little like
writing or printing as his early babble was like speech. He begins to
be interested in these printed and ,witten "things" and to imitate
them. The steps from this imitation to facile reading and writing are
as certain and as natural as were the earlier ones toward spoken
language. Huey suggested in 1908 "That the best way to get a reading vocabulary is just the way that the child gets his spoken vocabu-
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lary, by having the new words keep coming in a context environment
that is familiar and interesting."2
Huey's statement about the word being more than the sum of the
letters and the sentence more than the sum of the separate words is
somewhat of a reflection of an earlier book written by Farnham in
1881, reprinted in 1886 and 1895. In this work, Farnham wrote of
the cognizing of things by wholes and working from the whole to the
parts. Both of these works were written long before the rise of the
Gestalt school and yet read as if they came from the pen of a Gestalt
psychologist. The fact is, of course, that at the time Farnham and
Huey were writing, the preliminary work and thinking that were
later to develop into Gestalt theory was already being carried on.
In 1912 vVcrtheimer, who is regarded as the founder of Gestalt
psychology, defined a Gestalt as "(1 whole, the behaviour of which is
not determined by that of its individual elements, but in which the
past processes are themselves detennined by the intrinsic nature of
the whole."3 He called the type of thinking that builds from parts
t;. into vI/holes, "atomistic" or "brick-and-mortar" and insisted strongly
that it was an unproductive activity of the mind. It was not the
Gestalt idea that was new, but the matter of its formulation. Thirty
years before Farnham had been writing about "cognizing by wholes"
but \vas also going on to ask in the context of reading, "what is the
whole, the important whole which should engage the attention of the
teacher of reading at the earliest stages of instruction."4
The configuration method developed as an outgrowth of Gestaltist
belief that, generally from infancy \ve perceive the world in the complex, fully articulated way that we do as adults. Gestaltists advocated
teaching reading by a method in \vhich general shapes of words were
recognized and compared or contrasted with others to note similarities
and differenc~;,··One curious result of th~ configuration idea of teaching reading was to be seen in the design of books to fit the theory.
These books were to release the teacher from the narrow restrictions
of a regularly phonic vocabulary. The cat was no longer going to
be on the mat. All that was necessary \vas to find the words that
interested children most and that was easy. They would be the names
of things and actions that the child showed the liveliest interest in.
2. Hunter Diack, The Teaching of Reading, Philosophical Library, New York,
pp. 56-73, 1965.
3. Gp. cit.
4. Huey, "The Nature of Perception in Reading"-1908-Reviewed by Diack
in The Teaching of Reading.
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Away back in the nineteenth century, Horace Mann had said that a
child could learn to read twenty-six words in less time than it took
him to learn the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. The reason he
gave was that the words had meaning and interest very different from
the queer algebra of letters.
However, in spite of the fact that most five year olds have a
speaking vocabulary of 2,000 words (some authorities have given
higher estimates), it did not follow that children would learn to
recognize very easily the few hundred or more words necessary for
the telling of an interesting story. So the compilers of reading books
turned to the problem of designing books with as few different words
as possible without spoiling the story. Thus was born scientific vocabulary control. From the selling point of view, it was better to say
that the vocabulary was scientifically controlled than to say that the
book contained as few different words as possible, or to claim that
they were designed to teach children by keeping as many words from
them as possible, but that is what happened.
Now, the pendulum swings again to try to correct the lack of
vocabulary in a child's early reading experience. The feeling of many
reading experts is that a quick, simplified alphabet or code to break
the English language is essential if the early reader is not to become
discouraged. The seeds of i/t/a were planted more than one hundred
years ago (1825) when Sir Isaac Pitman, schoolmaster from Somerset, England invented Pitman shorthand which is phonic. In 1843,
he met Alexander John Ellis, a scholar whose book, The Alphabet
of Nations was the first serious work on scientific phonetics. Ellis
wanted to create a new phonetic English, while Pitman applied
phonetics to his shorthand.
In devising his shorthand Sir Isaac made a close study of the
phonic basis of English. His phonotype was one of the early alphabets
used to decode English for beginning readers. Experiments began in
1844, although the really large experiment with phonotypy did not
take place until 1852. In ten schools at Waltham, Massachusetts,
between 1852 and 1860, phonotypy was used for beginning stages
of learning to read, followed by a transfer to conventional spelling.
This two-stage technique set the pattern for subsequent experiments.
The notes Sir Isaac made on the phonic basis of English were
preserved and came into the hands of his grandson, Sir James Pitman, publisher and member of Parliament. "Sir James points out
what everyone knows, that our printed English is phonically phony.
O'lr standard spelling is full of booby traps. Unfortunately our printed
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English became fixed long before linguistic experts appeared on the
scene."5
Sir James claims no ambition to change the standard alphabet
or English spelling. Reading his grandfather's notes, he wondered if
the beginning reader might not make better progress if the alphabetical symbols could be made to represent exactly and distinctly
the sounds used in everyday speech. His forty-four symbols include
all but two letters of the regular alphabet. He tries to retain as much
of the original spelling of words as possible to ease the transition to
regularized or "grown-up" spelling.
To make a test in the schools, books were needed. These came
from a number of London publishers. Already there are more than
two hundred books (1964) transliterated into i/t/a or initial teaching
alphabet. With books available, pilot test programs began in the
schools under the watchful eyes of researchers. Classes using i/t/a
were matched with classes taught by traditional methods. Among the
most encouraging features of the i/t/a movement is the teaming of
classroom pilot programs with research check, and the cautious claims
of the proponents. There have been some implications of good results
among the mentally disturbed and those who are being trained to
use English as a second language.
No, the idea of a phonetic approach to teaching reading is not
new. Several times it has been tried and has been dropped from the
curriculum. Possibly this time, with improvements made, it will really
catch fire. Let's keep a cautious, watchful vigil and an open mind.
Maybe this time we have arrived. If so, it will be a very great innovation, for reading experts do not believe there is anyone right way
of teaching reading to everyone.
Bibliography
Diack, Hunter, The Teaching of Reading. New York: Philosophical
Library, 1965.
Dolch, E. W., Problems in Reading. Champaign, Illinois: Garrard
Press, 1949, pp. 156-158.
Downing, John, "i/t/a-Reading Experiment," The Reading Teacher~ 18 (November, 1964), pp. 105-110.
Johnson, Clifton, Ed., The District School As It Was. Vail Ballow
Press, First published in 1833 by Rev. Warren Burton.
5. Boutwell, Wm. D., "An Easier Way To Learn To Read"-i/t/a, P.T.A.
Magazine, Chicago, Illinois, September 1964, 59: pp. 11-13.